“A Melancholy Meditation on the False Millennium”

Edward Gorey’s works are commonly set within a hybrid Victorian/ Edwardian period and often elicit further confusion by containing comically anachronistic details and a nonsensical approach to time, all of which leads to Gorey’s characteristic “bewildering temporality” (Shortsleeve 2018: 104). As this paper shows with examples from The Broken Spoke (1976), The Object- Lesson (1958), and The Water Flowers (1976), Gorey employs manipulations of temporal boundaries within the framework of nonsense, such as simultaneity, digression, and repetition, which suggest timelessness and infinity. These are devices that necessarily draw the reader’s attention to the form, structure, and pattern of Gorey’s works, and the same is true of his intertextual quotation and nonsensical rearrangement of time-related motifs from other texts, as in the case of his parodic transplantation of Charles Dickens’ device of time-traveling ghosts (The Haunted Tea-Cosy, 1997). Nevertheless, despite a self-referential flaunting of form, Gorey’s works frequently accomplish a seriocomic confusion of tone that complicates any simplified reading of his tales as exclusively humorous. This effect, which has elicited descriptions of Gorey’s work as “radiat[ing] a melancholy and an existential unease” (Kindley 2018), is to some extent accomplished by his relatively frequent depiction of ghosts and apparitions, which inherently point toward the question of time, indicating both the past and the future. The paper concludes by exploring what implications such a bidirectional movement can have on the reader’s experience when encountering Gorey’s mysterious spectres.